Update to Aria Review (Froyo)

HTC & AT&T finally updated the HTC Aria to Froyo (Android 2.2). After about 2 weeks of using it my impressions are mixed. They added some eye candy (fading in and out) which unfortunately slowed down the sense UI. I have since turned off the animations so they don't slow anything down. Otherwise however, the phone does seem a little snappier. The update also seems to have fixed the headphone glitches I was experiencing so I don't have to reboot any more to get it to play sound through headphones. I also have not experienced loss of mobile network connectivity (I was sometimes not getting any network connectivity even when it showed '3G' and a good signal). I have not experienced and browser crashes or total phone crashes since the update either - but hey - it's only been 2 weeks. We'll reserve judgment on crashes for 6 months from now.

Android Ant Build Problem WIth Proguard and Latest SDK

Just like many Android developers, I had a working Ant build that included obfuscation using Proguard. When I upgraded to the latest SDK and tools (to include Android 2.3 and higher) my Ant build no longer worked. Instead I got this error:

add-proguard-release.xml:37: Expecting class path separator ':' before '{' in argument number 1

After adding a few echo Ant tasks before the offending error, I found that the value for external.libs.dir was not being set so it was still ${external.libs.dir} when used as part of another path (a classpath actually). My project didn't need any external libs so I simply commented it out of the add-proguard.release-xml. I hope this helps other Android developers!